Liverpool and Dublin Steam Packets

This caricature is from a satirical journal The Looking Glass or Caricature Annual, which was issued monthly between January 1830 and December 1832. The artist Robert Seymour (1798?-1836) was a popular and prolific illustrator and satirical cartoonist. His political caricatures were published in several London periodicals. This scene of the Liverpool and Dublin Steam Packets is one of a series referring to the Irish political situation; emigration from Ireland to England was common at this time even before the Great Irish Famine of 1845-50. Many Irish emigrants travelled to Liverpool to take a ship onwards to the United States.

Seymour went on to supply comic illustrations to stories by Charles Dickens. However, he was sensitive about his status as an artist, and was upset when Dickens, 12 years his junior and not yet an established writer, criticised his drawings and issued him with instructions for revising and improving them. Humiliated and frustrated by this situation, he committed suicide on 20 April 1836.